English

English 322: The Nineteenth-Century African American Novel

Professor Amber Shaw • MWF 3:30–4:20 • Oddfellows 105B

This section of English 322 (Topics in African American Literature) will trace the development of the African American novel throughout the long nineteenth century, paying particular attention to the intersections of racial, gendered, and classed identities. We will discuss how these nineteenth-century authors contend with pivotal events in nineteenth-century American history, including the 1807 abolition of the importation of slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the Civil War, the post-Civil War Constitutional Amendments, Reconstruction, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Jim Crow Laws. Alongside these landmark American events, we’ll also have the opportunity to explore the African American novel within the broader context of the nineteenth-century Black Atlantic. Throughout the course, we’ll consider how black American and British writers adhere to—and challenge—conventions of the nineteenth-century novel, and we’ll also discuss how (and why) formal and thematic choices underscore the ways in which racial identity and the politics of citizenship became transnational exigencies of the era.

Authors and texts may include: Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces.

Junior Seminar, Spring 2013
English 552: Chicago and The Transformation of American Life, Literature, and Thought
Tuesday and Thursday 1:30pm
Professor David Miller

In 1914 Carl Sandburg famously called Chicago “Hog Butcher of the World …. Stormy, husky, brawling,/City of Big Shoulders.”  Rising like a Phoenix from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1871 the former ‘garden’ city had become a place of skyscrapers, huge, showy department stores like Marshall Field, streets clogged with traffic, and a wilderness of railroad tracks, grain elevators, stockyards and slaughterhouses.

From this nexus of irresistible industrial forces emerged a vortex of creative energies.  The genie of unfettered capitalism was out of the bottle, wreaking all kinds of havoc but also accomplishing wonders.

 No metropolis so epitomized 20^th century America, pullulating with corruption, vice and crime, yet effervescent with democratic possibility.  No place so utterly exemplified the vertiginous trajectory of money. At Chicago’s Board of Trade, the futures market – portrayed by Frank Norris’s The Pit – turned financial risk into obsession, hurling the new anarchic credit economy into the heart of cultural discourse. All the while, the relentless commodification of nature – of grain, meat and lumber – established Chicago as a ‘gateway’ to the Great West, propelling an insatiable culture of consumerist desire, brilliantly examined in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, reconfiguring identities, motives and values as it blurred the boundaries of class, gender and race.

 This maelstrom of social conflict and cultural improvisation provides the context for examining Chicago writing from the 1890s on. Chicago’s leading authors tended to be journalists, attentive to the domineering issues of the day, probing beneath the surface of events to grasp the underlying dynamics of change.  Many came from the Midwest, from small towns and rural environments, to shape a distinctive cultural dialectic of city and country as the U.S. jolted toward a new corporate order.  We will consider the impact of such signal events in American history as the Haymarket Riot, the Pullman Strike, the “White City” of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the founding of the University of Chicago, and the Great Migration of blacks to the city.  We will explore the interaction of fiction by the likes of Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson and Richard Wright and poems by Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks with the work of such academics and reformers as John Dewey, Jane Addams, Thorstein Veblen, the architect Louis Sullivan and members of the Chicago School of Sociology.  We will examine the emergence of popular culture in the city, much of it coming out of Bronzeville, the black ghetto, and its pervasive effects on American life.

 The subject of Chicago offers a powerful basis for comprehending the relation of literature to history and for developing interdisciplinary as well as critical methodology in English.  It offers the opportunity to survey an extraordinary body of scholarship (no city, perhaps, has been so extensively written about), and to come to a reckoning with what it means to be an American living in the modern world.  Readings from a number of key historical studies of Chicago life will discuss the environmental as well as economic, social and political aspects of the metropolis. Some of this reading will be orally presented by students in class, adding up to an introduction to urban studies. Students will develop term paper topics from an ample list of texts and find their own way to make the most sense of it through close reading and historical contextualization.  

English 302: Forms of Poetry
Mondays and Wednesdays 3:30-4:45
Oddfellows 106
Professor Quinn
Poeming the Dead: The Elegy and its Heirs

Although the elegy as a song of mourning or a lament for the dead is not, strictly speaking, a “form” of poetry, it is a distinct “mode” of structuring loss and grief with a complex tradition of thematic conventions and formal patterning. In this course we will study “classic” English language literary elegies (Lycidas, Elegy Written in a County Churchyard, Adonais, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, In Memory of W.B. Yeats) for the ways they structure the occasion of loss. We will then look at a wide range of more informal treatment of loss and death in poems that might be called “elegiac,” exploring the way these both honor and resist their famous precedents. Though elegy is not a “form,” we will study form in elegy, examining the ways in which (per Seamus Heaney)

Trochee, trochee, falling: thus
Grief and meter order us.

The course will emphasize close reading skills as well as the intertextuality of a tradition of elegiac verse in which poems are speaking to and of poems (and often poets) that precede them.

The Council on Undergraduate Research hosts a Registry of Undergraduate Researchers. The purpose of this registry is to facilitate matchmaking between undergraduates who have research experience and a desire to pursue an advanced degree, with graduate schools seeking high quality students who are well prepared for research. The Registry is open to students and graduate schools in the fields of Anthropology/Archaeology, Arts/Humanities, Biology/Biochemistry, Business, Chemistry/Biochemistry, Economics, Education, Engineering, English and Linguistics, Environmental Studies, Geosciences, Health Professions, History, Journalism and Communications, Mathematics/Computer Science, Physics/ Astronomy, Political Science, Psychology, Social Work and Sociology.

Any undergraduate may go to https://www.cur.org/projects_and_services/registry/ to fill out a simple information form. Students may also elect to complete a longer curriculum vitae form. There is no charge to the student and records will be made available to bona fide Graduate Schools that contract with CUR for this service.

Organizations or companies seeking the students’ information for other marketing purposes will not be granted access. Graduate School representatives may contact students to invite applications or visits to the campus and laboratory, or to share information about their research programs and financial support opportunities.

Graduate schools may provide a link to their websites, and may provide a short description of opportunities, such as research fields and fellowships.

For graduate schools that wish to review the student information, there is an access fee of $1,500 for the entire database, or $300 for one specific discipline. Again, there is no cost to you as a student to create a profile.

Our hope that students who are currently in their junior year will register now, but anyone with undergraduate research experience may register at any time. You will be able to update your listing as appropriate, to include any summer research experience or information about Senior Theses and test scores. We also welcome submissions by students who are engaged in Masters’ Degree programs now but who plan on going on to a PhD program. Just fill out the information on the form including the date you intend to enter a PhD program and your date of completion of your undergraduate degree. Upload a link to your CV that contains complete information about your MS/MA degree activity (school, subject, thesis topic (if applicable), and advisor).

CUR believes that this service will be a great benefit for both students and graduate schools by narrowing the search for the right match. So if you are interested in graduate school, please take a moment to register now. Be sure to include a statement of your research interests, as this will be important for making the match.

Contact Information Below if you should have any questions.

Robin Howard
Senior Director, Membership Services
Council on Undergraduate Research
734 15th St NW
Suite 550
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 783-4810×203
(202) 783-4811 fax
robin@cur.org

Due date for senior project proposals and creative writing senior project auditions: 10/26/2012
Senior project due date for those writing projects this semester: 11/16/2012

Please visit  https://sites.allegheny.edu/english/senior-project/   for more information about proposals, auditions, and senior projects

Between September 15 and November 1, college and high school students worldwide are invited to submit an original video recitation of one of five preselected works. Top submissions will be featured on the W. W. Norton website, where Norton editors, students, and fans will vote on the winners. Winners will receive Barnes & Noble gift cards and will have their names included on the acknowledgments page of a Norton Anthology. For more information:

https://books.wwnorton.com/books/aboutcontent.aspx?id=17824&mid=64

MEADVILLE, Pa. – April 2, 2012 — The Single Voice Reading Series at Allegheny College will feature Pam Houston at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, April 10, in the Tillotson Room of the Tippie Alumni Center. The presentation is free and open to the public.

 Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, “Cowboys Are My Weakness,” which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and “Waltzing the Cat,” which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction. She has also written two novels, “Contents May Have Shifted” and “Sight Hound,” and two collections of autobiographical essays, “A Rough Guide to the Heart” and “A Little More About Me.”

 A member of the faculty at the University of California at Davis, Houston has also edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction and poetry titled “Women on Hunting: Essays, Fiction, and Poetry.”

 For more information about the Single Voice Reading Series, contact Associate Professor of English Christopher Bakken at cbakken@allegheny.edu.

Spring 2012 Deadlines

Senior project proposals and creative writing portfolios for Fall 2012 are due Friday, March 30, at 4 p.m.

Senior projects for Spring 2012 are due Friday, April 13 at 4 p.m.

THE CHAUTAUQUA WRITERS’ FESTIVAL SCHOLARSHIP

The deadline for submissions for THE CHAUTAUQUA WRITERS’ FESTIVAL SCHOLARSHIP this year is March 15, 2012.

This scholarship will allow two Allegheny students with experience in creative writing to attend the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival each June at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. Selected students will partake of three days of workshops, lectures, readings and panel discussions, as well as (if they choose) one-on-one consultations with writers, and open mic spoken arts events in a festive, informal setting.

This year’s festival takes place Thursday, June 14 through Sunday, June 17, 2012, and features fiction writers Christina Garcia and Glenn Taylor, poets Martin Espada and Judith Vollmer, and creative nonfiction writers Valerie Boyd and Natalia Rachel Singer  (For more information about the festival, click the “festival” link, below.)

The historic Chautauqua Institution, a Victorian era lakeside community, was founded in 1874 as a center for the arts, recreation, and spiritual renewal. It is the home of the oldest continuous book club in America (The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle) and the Chautauqua Literary Arts Center. Festival participants will be housed at the Bellinger Hall Retreat Center and may enjoy meals and programs at various venues throughout the scenic Institution grounds.

Allegheny’s Chautauqua Writers’ Festival Scholarship covers the cost of tuition and lodging and meals for each student. Students are responsible for arranging transportation to and from the Institution, which is roughly 75 minutes north of Meadville, PA.
To qualify for the scholarship, students

1. Must have taken at least two courses in creative writing at Allegheny
2.  Must complete an» application sheet
3.  Must submit that sheet and a writing sample in hard copy (one short story or creative nonfiction essay,or five poems) to Ada Berdeguer in Oddfellows Hall by March 15, 2012 in any given year.

Late applications will not be considered.  HARD COPIES ONLY.  Graduating seniors are only in very rare instances awarded scholarships.  If no student or students are deemed eligible in a particular year, no scholarship will be awarded.

Students receiving the scholarship must submit a post-conference response to the Dean of the college (two typed pages, emailed as an attachment in Word, submitted within ten days of the end of the Festival), describing Festival highlights and the specific benefits the experience afforded that student in terms of his or her craft.  A copy of this response should also be sent to Professor Nesset, delivered within the same time frame.
Information about the festival:  https://www.ciweb.org/writers-festival/